“I mean, we had a long summer,” O’Malley continued. “And we talked about the fact that we have to police our corners and police our police.”
Not long after O’Malley departed I got a call from former Baltimore police officer Neill Franklin. Born and raised in Baltimore, Franklin spent decades as a Maryland State Police officer and a Baltimore police officer, including stints as an undercover officer working drug stings in the 1980s and as the department’s head of training and human resources from 2000 to 2004. Now he works as a police reform advocate, specifically focused on ending the drug war and many of the policies he was responsible for enforcing when he worked as an officer.
“To be surprised that we ended up with this type of community unrest over the last week? It shouldn’t be a surprise,” Franklin told me. “It was just a matter of when.”
“The goal was to go out there and make as many low-level drug arrests as possible. These were people who needed treatment instead of jails,” he said. “And in these searches, we were stopping and searching anyone who might look like they fit the bill of a drug user…and now we’re seeing arrests for failure to obey, and for disorderly conduct because they didn’t want to be frisked…officers did whatever they had to do to lock up as many people as they could to satisfy police headquarters.”
Franklin and several other former officers whom I interviewed in the days after the riots pointed specifically to two things: the end of community policing programs such as police athletic leagues, and “zero tolerance” policing. While they’re not a fix-all for a policing system in dire need of reform—Fresno had taught me as much—the officers I spoke with in Baltimore were quick to note that the loss of their community policing programs only deepened the deficit of trust in neighborhoods where their sole interactions with citizens were now patdowns and arrests.
“The first order of leadership is providing a safe place to live, work, and raise a family. Without civil order and accountability, other well-intended policy issues fail. Trust is the foundational issue many around the country are struggling with.… At the very core we are dealing with the foundation issue of trust, and that’s trust between the community and its police department,” said Rob Weinhold, who spent years as a Baltimore police officer, including as the department’s top spokesman, before leaving for a job with the Justice Department in 2000.
“Which, by the way, yielded terrific results from a crime standpoint,” Weinhold noted. “But what I know is this: you can’t arrest your way out of the drug problem.… When a department begins to arrest everyone for any infraction, the first thing that happens is your criminal justice system becomes overwhelmed, and then it creates a lot of anger within the community.”
In fact, a 2013 strategic plan prepared by the Baltimore police commissioner focused heavily on community policing, declaring that having more foot patrols and stronger relationships between officers and citizens, especially in heavily policed areas, was the best way to cut crime.Yet in 2014, a thorough probe by the Baltimore Sun found that even as new city leaders were touting community policing, the city was continuing to pay out millions in settlements and lawsuits related to police brutality—poisoning already-fragile community relationships.
“I interact with law enforcement every day, and what I’m seeing on a daily basis, the way that the young men and women in our community are being treated is unacceptable,” said Charmaine Slade, a twenty-four-year-old Baltimore native who works for the city as a probation agent. “I’ve got clients who are arrested twelve or thirteen times a year. Their charges are dismissed but they’re still sitting in jails. That’s why there is no trust for law enforcement.”
In a survey conducted by the Baltimore Police Department in 2013, 53 percent of residents described their perception of their police force as very or somewhat favorable. However, 31 percent of the respondents described their perception of the Baltimore PD as unfavorable, and another 16 percent did not respond to the question.
And the shaky relationship cuts both ways. In a 2013 survey of Baltimore police officers, just 19 percent of officers said they believed the community supported the department and only 9 percent described the department’s morale as good.Meanwhile, some observers have noted that while the police force is relatively diverse—roughly 47 percent of the force is black, in a city that is 64 percent black—many of the department’s officers live outside the city.
“I don’t think you have to live in the city, but I want you to have lived in the city. I want you to have invested. I want you to understand what makes a city tick, I want you to have ridden a city bus,” Peter Moskos, an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former Baltimore police officer, told me. “There is something [sic] really rubs me the wrong way when you get some white guy who had never lived in Baltimore before out policing these majority-black neighborhoods.”
As Martin O’Malley made his way down the block that Tuesday afternoon in Baltimore, he approached a street musician and community resident. The resident asked if O’Malley wanted to really work to solve the problem of police brutality, and when the former mayor said yes, the man asked how he could get in touch. O’Malley fiddled for a few seconds—he didn’t have any business cards on him, and neither did any of his aides. The candidate had walked himself into a trap: Was he willing to recite the ten digits of his cell phone number to this man on the street and risk the television cameras catching it?
As reporters offered him both pens and paper to write down his number for the resident, O’Malley smiled awkwardly, hemming and hawing in a last-ditch effort to avoid having to give his direct contact information to his former constituent. Finally, after a minute that felt like five, one of his aides located a campaign business card and handed it to the man.
Satisfied that he had saved the photo op, O’Malley was guided into the passenger seat of a black SUV that had pulled up at the end of the block and was whisked away.
With the former mayor gone, several of the remaining reporters approached the man on the motorcycle, who was still sitting just several feet away from the scrum.
“He had his chance to fix this,” said Wayne Grady, who described himself as a housing developer, as he continued to sit on his motorcycle. He said he couldn’t help himself when he saw O’Malley touring the riot-damaged neighborhood and posing for pictures: after spending all of his forty-seven years in Baltimore, Grady believed he had earned the right to call a spade a spade.
“He’s part of the frustrations that are built up in these black young men…that’s why central booking was so crowded, because he started the policies.”
Later that night, a longtime local reporter put it even more bluntly.
“Just look around at this place,” the reporter told me, pointing to abandoned and deteriorated buildings. “This is his legacy. And now he wants to run the whole country?”
With just an hour until the city-imposed curfew, large crowds of people remained at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and North Avenue in West Baltimore. Demonstrators stood face-to-face with lines of police officers. Soon after 9 p.m., dozens of volunteers, some in clergy clothes, and some young men who described themselves as gang members, pushed their way through the crowd. As they reached the police line, they locked arms and insisted the crowds move back and away from the police.
“Bet you never thought you’d see the Bloods and the Crips do this,” declared one volunteer, a red bandana covering his face.
But after they had moved the crowd back a few feet, a single water bottle was thrown over their heads and landed at the feet of the officers, who immediately raised their shields and prepared to respond.
“No, no, no!” shouted several of the volunteers as they rushed back to the police line, insisting the officers not engage.
When the officers listened, the volunteers again locked arms and pushed the crowd and media back more than a block from the police line, urging everyone to go home.
“Let’s show America
that we don’t need police to police us, we can disperse ourselves,” urged then–State Senator Catherine Pugh, whose voice came from a loudspeaker just behind the police line. “Let’s disperse peacefully.”
After violence starts to gain momentum, a curfew is one of the first steps taken to regain control of a city. The line between day and night becomes the way to identify and detain those few among the crowds who are bent on violence.
But the curfew also furthers the media spectacle. Once a deadline is set, cameras have to stay at least that late, to see what happens. So the standoff begins. The residents are watching the police and the media. The media are watching the residents and the police. The police are standing there, waiting for a water bottle or a rock to land at their feet; then they’ll teargas whoever they find.
By 9:40 p.m., there were still more than a hundred people in the street in West Baltimore. And at least a hundred reporters, photographers, and videographers.
“We had to come to show that black lives matter, that this is about more than Freddie Gray,” LaKeisha Shuey, an eighteen-year-old who drove from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to join the demonstration, told me as we waited to see what would happen at the 10 p.m. deadline. “Ninety-nine percent of these protests have been peaceful, so it’s important to be out here highlighting and showing that.”
As 10 p.m. arrived, there was peaceful silence. No tear gas, no rubber bullets, no sudden aggressiveness from either the demonstrators or the police.
About five minutes after the curfew, the booming voice of Congressman Elijah Cummings emerged from a loudspeaker, urging the crowd to leave and go home.
“There is nothing wrong with peaceful protest,” he said. “We all need to go home.”
Then I heard shouting, a singular, strong voice cutting through the air and prompting the chatter of a crowd in response.
As I moved toward the noise, I saw cameras encircling two men—an older, silver-haired media type and a young black man in a backward baseball cap and a black hoodie.
“Is that Geraldo?” I asked myself. It was, in fact, Geraldo.
Geraldo Rivera, the former broadcast journalist turned talk show host turned conservative political talking head, had been working the streets for a few hours, followed by a bodyguard and a cameraman. The men would approach a group of protesters, asking them to condemn the violence of the night before.
It was typical of much of the cable news coverage of the unrest both in Ferguson and in Baltimore. Of course the peaceful protesters carrying homemade signs and leading the chants didn’t agree with the violence: they were the true victims of it. Trapped as they were in neighborhoods where businesses and economic opportunities were few and far between, one less CVS or gas station was a major blow to their quality of life. But the habit of cable news anchors and reporters of insisting that each person on the streets answer, repeatedly, the question of whether they condemned rioting, served only to highlight the truth: that the majority of protesters were peaceful, and that violence was being carried out without the consent or sanction of the majority of those on the street.
“All we want is Fox News and every other white media outlet to leave Baltimore until they are going to report the real story!” shouted the young man as Geraldo moved on to interview other protesters around him. The young man, and many who were part of the protests, believed the police had purposely facilitated the rioting with the hope of discrediting the demonstrations. Why hadn’t officers stopped the looting, they asked?
“You really think a bunch of high school students really took down Baltimore city yesterday?” the man in the baseball cap and black hoodie shouted. “And y’all couldn’t do nothing?…We want the mayor to resign, we want Anthony Batts [then the police commissioner], we want the police out. We want the police gone.”
As Geraldo stood, speaking live on Fox News, the man stepped in front of him.
“We want you gone!” he shouted.
“Don’t touch my camera!” Geraldo responded.
“This is our city!” the young activist shot back.
The sharp-tongued, quick-witted young man was the then-twenty-year-old Darius “Kwame Rose” Rosebrough.
Rose had grown up in Baltimore, but in another Baltimore than the one where Freddie Gray and many of the black men who call this city home lived. Rose’s parents weren’t drug addicts or drifters; they were both college-educated professionals who raised their kids on the more affluent east side of the city, homeschooling them until fourth grade and then sending them to private schools. “But privilege didn’t necessarily protect me from racism or white supremacy,” Rose later told me.
Rose told me his transition into private school was tough, full of fights with fellow students—white classmates who teased him for his brown skin, and black classmates who called him bougie and stuck-up, envious of his comfortable family life.
“Freddie Gray’s death helped me fully grasp for the first time that I wasn’t really free, even with my privilege. We were all under attack. Black lives and black bodies were all imperiled.”
After high school, Rose went to the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he had a scholarship and a place on the speech and debate team. It was fitting: the energy bursts from his voice when he debates, a flurry of well-crafted sentences carrying soaring rhetoric from his lips.
“College debate is definitely a white activity, and here I was trying to project my blackness, and probably overdoing it,” Rose told me later. “I was that Farrakhan kid who was trying to assert his blackness in every space, purposely making people uncomfortable.”
But he only stayed on campus for a year, before moving back home, where he took a series of odd jobs, joined a band, became a regular in the city nightlife circuit, and got involved in the local activist scene—helping to start a youth mentorship program in one of Baltimore’s worst-performing middle schools.
“We went into one of the most underperforming places in Baltimore City and tried to be big brothers to the young men there,” Rose said. “These boys, because of where they live, are forced to grow up more quickly. Knowing that, we tried to instill in them leadership qualities.”
It wasn’t college, but it was a comfortable life for a twentysomething. Rose would spend his days working his job as a bellboy at the Inner Harbor Marriott, his afternoons running the mentorship program, and his nights on the dance floors and barstools of the city’s hip-hop clubs.
Rose was at work when he first heard the name Freddie Gray, as coworkers discussed the young man who lived not far from him, and who was apparently in the hospital after being arrested. He was also at work when he first heard of Freddie Gray’s death, after a colleague saw it on social media and pointed it out to him; Rose quickly decided to join the infant protests.
“I got off work at eleven p.m. and was out in the streets until six a.m.,” Rose recalled about that first night. “The police didn’t take any of it seriously at first. They were all just sitting around, eating pizza and telling jokes. The whole thing was a joke to them. They thought Freddie was just another drug-dealing knucklehead who didn’t matter.”
You can understand what drove Kwame Rose to the streets in protest, but what about so many other young people? As was the case in Ferguson, the media became as much a motivating factor as the death itself. While cable news talking heads often declare that the media is to blame for mass protests—arguing that if the cameras would go away, so would the demonstrators—the logic is only partially correct, and it diagnoses the wrong root cause. Many of those who take to the street and demand justice do emerge in response to the media, but it’s not necessarily because they want to get on camera (although many of the protesters happily embrace the chance to step under the bright lights and speak their piece). Rather, many in these communities show up in the streets because they do not recognize the way their home is being depicted on their television sets. They are upset and offended by what they are hearing and reading about their community. They emerge to serve as omb
udsmen, correct the record, tell their own stories. The people who took to the streets were, in many ways, protesting not only the death of Freddie Gray, but also the way his life and death had been portrayed in the media.
“What hit me was they were reporting thugs and criminals are taking to the streets, but when I looked at the TV, I saw kids who were just let out of school and who were angry about Freddie Gray’s death,” Rose said. “The media was serving no other purpose than to instill fear in people. For the first time ever, I was seeing firsthand that the media was not explaining to people what was going on. It was just telling white audiences, essentially, that they should be afraid of black people.
“This was a moment for me. I had always gotten in trouble growing up, for being argumentative and for yelling at people,” Rose said. “Now I was able to use that to fight for a real change. To do the real work to make my city a better place for people who look like me. None of us activists planned any protests, there were no ‘organizers,’ there were just thousands of people who poured out into the streets, which is beautiful because that means there are thousands of people who care about justice.”
As Rose and Geraldo went back and forth, a police helicopter overhead warned that the curfew was in place and everyone must leave.
“All news media please clear the area,” the helicopter’s message said. “You must go home or you are subject to arrest.”
At 10:15 p.m. the police moved forward about ten steps, prompting dozens of young people still in the street to scatter. As volunteers ran to protect the residents, several bottles and rocks flew at the officers, hitting their riot shields. The officers responded by firing smoke canisters, one of which landed next to a trash can, sparking a fire.
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